When last we met Allen Carpenter, he was about to climb back into Hell. Back up Satan’s huge leg and onto the vast plain of ice that was the final, inner circle of Dante’s Inferno, to pursue his self-imposed mission of telling all of Hell’s denizens that there was a way out, and that they could leave if they wanted to badly enough. Or should that be goodly enough?
It was quite a tale, and Kathleen Bartholomew has reviewed it elsewhere. Go read what she has to say; in the meantime, I’ll give my own short synopsis.
In Niven and Pournelle’s earlier book, Inferno, written in 1976, mid-list science fiction writer Allen Carpenter (pen name Carpentier) wakes up to find himself in hell, having fallen to his death from a hotel window after drinking too much to impress his fans at a sci-fi con. A mysterious character named Benito tries to convince him that he is indeed in the place Dante described in the Inferno and sets about leading him out — which means descending from the vestibule where Carpenter awoke through all the various hellacious circles to the very center. Carpenter spends most of his time trying to make the evidence fit his theory, which is that he is in Infernoland, a maniacal theme park or perhaps insane asylum constructed either by aliens or powerful humans from some distant future. Eventually, Occam’s Razor convinces him that he is indeed in Hell, and he begins to learn humility through his various tribulations, signified when he returns to thinking about himself as Carpenter, not Carpentier.
When Escape From Hell opens, Carpenter has been vegetating in the grove of suicides for a long time, feeling sorry for himself. Things have not gone as he had planned. Nobody believes that there is a way out of Hell, or wants to leave if they do believe him. Then he learns that the tree he has been camped out under is a famous suicide — poet Sylvia Plath — and that he can talk to her. So as the device for filling us in on what he’s been doing since last we met, he tells her about it. Eventually he figures out how to set Sylvia free from her tree-ness (it’s a gruesome but effective solution), and the two set off on their own pilgrimage.
Where Inferno only alluded to Dante’s work, here each chapter has an epigraph taken from one or another translation, mostly Longfellow’s. It helps, I think, to give a sense of what the original work was like.
Allen and Sylvia pick up a lot of additional souls along the way. This book is (or at least seems) more highly populated with characters than Inferno. That’s both a strength and a weakness. It’s a strength in a couple of ways. First, it’s an adventure story, and the addition of more characters often helps move the action along. Second, it seems more in keeping with the way Dante told his tale. The characters we meet here are either former acquaintances of Allen’s or Syvia’s — including a hilarious encounter with her widower, Ted Hughes and the passel of harpies who harass him through Hell — or are other figures from either recent or ancient history. True, there were plenty of those in Inferno, but in this book, more of them join in the trek than before. One of them is the murderous race car Allen and Benito hijacked and rode across the flaming desert, who turns out to be a former Nascar driver. All of this, of course, is ripe fodder for much satirical commentary on contemporary life, which echoes Dante’s technique as well.
But it’s a bit of a weakness as well. After a while, things got a little confusing: who’s Carl? And then there’s the bit where the authors set about repairing the reputation of an early radio evangelist, who is definitely a larger-than-life character, but feels a bit extraneous here. Or maybe just a step too far into satire.
I found myself wishing that the authors had delved a bit further into an obvious potential explanation for the existence of Hell — something that would incorporate quantum physics and the kind of ideas explored by Heinlein and others. That Hell exists because people have created it, in their minds and their literature. Actually they do allude to this a time or two, when one or another of the characters touches on the idea of co-creation. It seems a logical idea to me — we create our own Heaven or Hell, both while we live and perhaps in the afterlife.
The ending comes with a bang and something of a surprise, which allows the authors to get out of the story without tying up several loose ends.
One other thing about this book keeps nagging at me. Although the authors work in plenty of contemporary political themes, they shy away from the one big theme of the past 30 years, and one which intimately involves the Catholic Church: abortion. They cover themselves with a final note: “This is, of course, a fantasy novel, not a treatise on theology and salvation.” And of course they’re right. But it just feels as though they’re willing to open a lot of cans of worms, but not the biggest one. Ah, well. They have to answer to their maker, not to me. And I still enjoyed the book, and continue to count myself a fan of Niven and Pournelle.
(Tor, 2009)
